The Untapped Power of Regional Managers in Multifamily Operations
A few summers ago, I sat in the back row of a leadership meeting, watching a regional manager present. She had six properties on her plate, each with its own mix of challenges—maintenance backlogs, compliance deadlines, resident turnover. Her slides were neat, her reports complete. She delivered the data without missing a beat. But when the COO asked, “What’s your team learning from these challenges?” the room went silent.
That moment captured a truth I’ve seen play out across two decades of multifamily operations: regional managers are often treated as supervisors and report gatherers rather than as the coaches they could be. And when that happens, organizations leave millions of dollars of performance potential untapped.
Why Regionals Are the Most Underutilized Resource
In property management, the regional role sits in a unique position of influence. A single regional manager often oversees 8 to 12 properties, shaping the daily reality of hundreds of employees and thousands of residents. Yet, too often, their calendars are consumed by compliance checks, report reviews, and crisis response.
It’s not that these tasks are unimportant. Compliance and accountability matter. But if that’s the ceiling of a regional manager’s contribution, you’ve essentially created a bottleneck. All problems must pass through them, all solutions depend on their attention, and all decisions wait for their approval. In an industry where speed and adaptability drive both resident satisfaction and financial performance, that model simply doesn’t scale.
Contrast that with portfolios where regionals are developed as coaches. Instead of bottlenecks, they become multipliers. They don’t just solve problems—they grow problem-solvers. They don’t just enforce standards—they cultivate ownership. They don’t just react to underperformance—they build systems that prevent it.
The numbers back this up. In my own work with operators across the country, I’ve consistently seen portfolios with coaching-oriented regionals outperform peers by 16–20% in NOI, retention, and resident satisfaction. That is not a marginal lift—it’s a competitive advantage.
Supervisor vs. Coach: The Real Divide
The distinction is clear once you see it:
Supervisor regionals focus on compliance and reporting.
Coach regionals develop decision-making capacity in site teams.
Supervisor regionals solve problems themselves.
Coach regionals equip others to solve problems.
Supervisor regionals enforce standards.
Coach regionals inspire ownership of outcomes.
Supervisor regionals react to underperformance.
Coach regionals build systems that prevent it.
When regionals shift from supervision to coaching, a cascade of improvement begins. Site teams gain confidence to act at their level. Problems get solved closer to the resident. Innovation surfaces from those closest to the work. Regionals spend less time firefighting and more time advancing strategy. Burnout decreases as capability increases.
I watched one client make this shift intentionally. They redefined the regional role from “inspector general” to “team developer.” Within a year, they saw a reduction in regional workload, an improvement in site-level problem resolution, and a lift in renewals across the portfolio. Residents noticed the difference, too—satisfaction scores rose by 18%. These weren’t incremental changes; they were transformational.
Why Leaders Miss the Opportunity
So why don’t more executives develop their regionals this way? In my experience, there are three reasons.
First, tradition. The regional role evolved as a supervisory layer, and many organizations have never reexamined that assumption.
Second, measurement. It’s easier to track report submission and compliance checks than to measure coaching effectiveness. But just because it’s harder to quantify doesn’t mean it matters less.
Third, permission. Many regionals don’t feel empowered to step out of the supervisor mindset. They fear being seen as neglecting oversight if they spend time developing people instead of reviewing reports.
This is where executive leadership must intervene. Without explicit permission and support, regionals stay stuck in the cycle of micromanagement.
Building the Coaching Regional
Transformation requires more than a memo. It takes intentional development. The most effective regional managers I’ve worked with were equipped with three things:
Coaching skills. Active listening, powerful questioning, and developmental feedback are not soft skills; they are leadership skills that drive performance.
Behavioral insight tools. Using frameworks like DISC helps regionals understand communication styles, both their own and those of their teams. This creates alignment and reduces the friction that often leads to turnover.
Systems for developing others. Clear frameworks for delegation, accountability, and feedback allow regionals to scale their impact across dispersed teams. Coaching without structure risks becoming vague encouragement. Coaching with structure creates measurable results.
When regionals have these tools, they stop carrying their teams on their backs and start unlocking the capacity within their teams.
The Multiplier Math
Let’s put this into numbers. Imagine a regional managing 10 properties. As a supervisor, she personally solves 30 issues per week, burning through her own capacity while her teams remain dependent. As a coach, she develops each property manager to solve an additional three problems independently per week. That’s 30 issues solved without her involvement. Over a year, that’s more than 1,500 problems resolved at the source rather than escalated upward.
Multiply that across five regionals, and you’ve created the equivalent of another full regional’s worth of capacity—without hiring anyone new. That’s the multiplier effect.
Executive Reflection
Here’s the question every multifamily leader should ask: Are my regional managers drowning in reports, or are they developing their teams?
If it’s the former, you’re leaving performance on the table. If it’s the latter, you’ve discovered a competitive advantage that most of the industry has yet to claim.
At Weishaar Strategic Partners, we help operators make this shift. By equipping regionals with coaching skills, behavioral insight tools, and frameworks for team development, we transform them from supervisors into multipliers. The results are measurable: lower turnover, higher NOI, stronger resident satisfaction, and healthier leadership pipelines.
The potential is there. The question is whether you’ll unlock it.
